Publisher's Synopsis
Love's Madness is an important new contribution to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, Helen Small presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical writers and novelists of the nineteenth century thought about madness, about femininity, and about narrative convention. At the centre of the book are studies of novels by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bront "e, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, but Small also brings out the historical and literary interest of hitherto neglected writings by Charles Maturin, Lady Caroline Lamb, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and others. Stories about women who go mad when they lose their lovers were extraordinarily popular during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, attracting novelists, poets, dramatists, musicians, painters and sculptors. The representative figure of madness ceased to be the madman in chains and became instead the woman whose insanity was an extension of her female condition. Love's Madness traces the fortunes of the love-mad woman in fiction and in medicine between about 1800 and 1865.;This book is intended for scholars and students of English Literature, in particular of the 19th-century novel; students of the history of medicine, of feminism, and social history.
